A film can become famous for the wrong reasons. Those reasons often have nothing to do with authors’ intentions and sometimes even less to do with what the audience was able to see on the screen. An example can be found in *Manhattan Melodrama*, 1934 crime drama directed by W. S. Van Dyke, a film that became one of the more (in)famous and controversial titles in history of 1930s Hollywood. The plot begins with a pro…







